These 11 tech companies have collectively raised $2.8 billion this year. That’s quite a number. Five companies raised rounds of $200 million or more in 2013, as compared to the three last year, and six more made the $150 million club. Rounds of this magnitude generally go to companies that have already proved their idea and market, and now require mountains of money to scale the business, refine the business model, and fuel international growth. A look at largest venture capital investments of the year provides an interesting perspective on the hottest trends happening in the tech world, and the types of companies that present the most promising opportunities for growth. Interestingly, the largest funding round of the year went to an under-the-radar networking solutions provider called Genband. Box, Fab, and Pinterest made this list two years in a row. About half of the biggest deals were for companies based outside of Silicon Valley. For one, this marked its first round of funding, and four raised not one, but two nine-figure rounds this year. Let’s take a look.

1. Genband — $343.5 million

Friso, Texas-based Genband secured $343.5 million. Genband specializes in voice-over-Internet-protocol tech, known as VoIP. It works with telecom providers such as Comcast and Sprint-Nextel to enable VoIP for their customers. The company also makes multimedia application software and various other infrastructure products for telcos. Genband has been around since 1999 and was ranked as the number one venture-backed company in the U.S. by the Wall Street Journal in 2012. One Equity Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Venrock were investors in this sky-high round of funding. Genband has raised $394 million to date.

3. Lazada — $250 million

“Super-incubator” Rocket Internet is known for attracting massive funding rounds for its portfolio companies, but $250 million is big even by its standards. Lazada, Rocket’s Southeast Asian Amazon clone, raked in $250 million in December, closely following its $100 million round from earlier this year. All this money ($436 million in total) is intended to cement Lazada’s position as the dominant online retailer in Southeast Asian. Rocket Internet’s strategy is to create “fast follow” e-commerce companies that take established business models like Amazon and Zappos and plant them in emerging markets, and then funnel millions upon millions of dollars to establishing regional hegemony. Lazada sells electronics, clothes, appliances, books, cosmetics, and more to people in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. It already claims to be Southeast Asia’s largest online shopping mall, and this money is part of an aggressive effort to capture the market before competitors. U.K. grocery chain Tesco led this round, marking its first investment into an entirely online company. Access Industries, Investment AB Kinnevik, and Verlinvest also contributed.

5. Airwatch — $225 million

Airwatch raised $225 million this year to help IT departments respond to the rising bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement. IT managers use Airwatch’s software to track and monitor all of a company’s devices at once, saving them time and energy while reducing the risk of security breaches from unsecured devices. Atlantia-based Airwatch operated for ten years without raising outside capital and raised this money to make acquisitions and expand its customer base. Airwatch is backed by Insight Venture Partners and Accel.

6. Palantir — $196 million

Shadowy data-mining startup Palantir closed over $196 million in funding in 2013. The startup is notoriously press-shy, as it mines highly sensitive data for pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. Palantir is known for its unrivaled engineering and data science team, which takes “messy swamps” of data and turns it into data visualizations and maps. The company is valued at over $8 billion and the CEO said it is likely to close $1 billion in contracts in 2014. Palantir raised an additional $107 million about two weeks ago in an effort to diversify its customer base and add more private customers, bringing its yearly total to $303 million and its all-time total to $605 million. Investors include the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

7. Fanatics $170 million

Fanatics secured $170 million in financing this year to feed sports fan fervor. The company is an online retailer of official licensed sports merchandise. It powers the e-commerce sites for all major professional sports leagues, major media brands, and over 200 collegiate and professional team properties. If you want to buy an NFL jersey, a MLB baseball cap, a NASCAR collectible car, or a branded basketball bag, Fanatics is the online place to do it. Fanatics sells hundreds of thousands of items, and this funding was raised to grow its inventory, fund overseas expansion, and improve distribution. Singapore-based Temasek Holdings and China-based Alibaba Group contributed to this round. Fanatics raised another large round of $150 million in 2012 from Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Venture Partners. It has raised $320 million in venture capital to date.

8. Fab — $165 million

Fab was a darling of the e-commerce world once upon a time, but 2013 was a rough year. Yes, it raised an enormous amount of money, but it is also bleeding millions. Fab’s founder Jason Goldberg announced earlier this year that the company decided to pivot away from flash sales and towards its own products, and that it raised $150 million to do it. This fourth round attracted additional investors and ultimately tallied up to $165 million. Along with the change in business model and funding came large scale restructuring — Fab laid off hundreds of employees and lost a number of members from its executive team. The company is still struggling to gain solid footing, which is somewhat unusual for a company backed by $330 million in venture capital. Chinese company Tencent led this round for Fab. Others investors include Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Itochu, and Menlo Ventures. Fab’s $117 million funding round from 2012 made the top deals list last year. Fab has pulled in $363 million in funding since 2010.

10. MongoDB — $150 million

MongoDB raised $150 million this year with a valuation of $1.2 billion, allegedly the highest startup valuation in New York City. This round was a big step up from the $42 million the startup raised in 2012. MongoDB is the leading NoSQL operational database provider. Developers use its tech to easily enter and retrieve data for applications, and its software serves as the backbone for plenty of cloud services. Legacy tech players like Oracle, IBM, and SAP ruled this market for decades with their relational database technology. However nowadays businesses are increasingly using operational databases because they are more flexible, and MongoDB is a leader among the companies offering new, more agile alternatives. MongoDB has more than 600 customers, including Goldman Sachs and MetLife. The latest round included new investors EMC, Salesforce, T. Rowe Price, and Altimeter, as well as previous investors Intel, Red Hat, New Enterprise Associates, and Sequoia Capital.

11. Pure Storage — $150 million

Like MongoDB, Pure Storage offers a highly lucrative product that is difficult for laypeople to understand — Pure Storage offers all-flash storage arrays to enterprise organizations. The surge in data use from smartphone and tablets has caused a veritable flood of data, that traditional data centers are struggling to accommodate. Flash storage compresses information using solid state disks rather than bulky hard drives and has the potential to process the data faster, more reliably, and with less energy than a hard disk drive Venture capitalists, as well as corporations like IBM, are bullish about flash storage’s future, and Pure Storage has many rivals — Violin Memory, Nimble Storage, SolidFire, Virident, and Fusion-IO to name a few. Pure Storage raised this hefty round to stay competitive and evangelize the power of flash storage. T.Rowe Price and Tiger Global Management led its funding round, with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. Pure Storage’s total capital raised is $245 million

More information:

(from Web Site) Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information. Palantir was founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists. The company has doubled in size every yea... read more »

Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they fi... read more »

MongoDB is the next-generation database that helps businesses transform their industries by harnessing the power of data. The world’s most sophisticated organizations, from cutting-edge startups to the largest companies, use MongoDB ... read more »

Box was founded on a simple, powerful idea: it should be easy for people to access, collaborate, and share all their content, wherever they are. Co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, along with our fast-growing team, have since esta... read more »

Uber Technologies Inc is known as Everyone's Private Driver. Uber operates an on-demand car service used all over the world. With the touch of a button from your phone, you can experience your own private driver. Sign-up quickly, get p... read more »

Fab.com (originally Fabulis.com), also known as Fab, is an e-commerce company focused on design across all price points and all verticals that offers daily flash sales of design items and longer-term curated sales based on specific the... read more »

Lazada Indonesia is committed to offering the highest quality products with a wide selection of products and brands comprehensive in Indonesia. With the hospitality given by Lazada service team, we want to make sure customers get the s... read more »

AirWatch is the leader in enterprise-grade Mobile Device Management, Mobile Application Management and Mobile Content Management solutions designed to simplify mobility. More than 8,000 customers across the world trust AirWatch to mana... read more »